Rodrigo Cano

Tools and Gameplay Programmer

Currently working on interaction prototypes closely with designers and artists. I tend to focus on tools, gameplay, or any other interesting problem that finds its way. I like to combine my technical skills and my communication skills to make people's job easier during development by executing designs with fewer iterations and making more useful tools that will save everyone time in the long run.

Created a refraction based wet/splash post process effect optimized for iPad

Working in conjunction with the Office of the Chief Creative Officer (OCCO) at Electronic Arts, we developed a game, on the iPad, whose assets and data can be influenced by the product created by the project tEAm, headquartered in Pittsburgh. The challenge was to make a game that is completely agnostic of other media, and yet has meaningful changes occur when a player interacts with outside products.

Audio Wave

Game Design Class Prototype

This is a music game with a neat interactive plane I made along with the other effects and textures. It utilizes a convolution based mesh deformer and shader. It was a prototype that I made with Evan Li in less than 40 hours. The game is simple. Click the hexagons to the beat and get rewarded with some neat effects.

Neuraltone

Client Project with Carnegie Mellon and The Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition

Tools and Gameplay Programmer

Managed programming tasks, designed architecture to allow for easy customization

Created a researcher friendly, out-of-editor, asset and level customization tool

Made various reusable planet shaders

Nueraltone is a joint venture between the Entertainment Technology Center and The Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Its objective is to create a game and research tool that will implicitly teach its players to recognize frequencies of sounds that their brains have naturally ignored in the past. This will allow the players to eventually learn, hear, and better understand foreign languages.

Packet Loss

Building Virtual Worlds

Gameplay Programmer

Uses Playstation Moves to draw on to the screen

This was co-created with a team of five during Carnegie Mellon's infamous Building Virtual Worlds Class. It is a 1v1 game where the player can build walls to either defend or attack the other player using their Playstation Move controllers

Education

2012 - 2013

Carnegie Mellon University

from January 2012 to December 2013

Master's in Entertainment Technology

The first semester comprises of rapid prototyping five games in an agile environment. Each game took anywhere from a week to three weeks to create.
Afterwards we are put in multidisciplinary teams for semester long projects where we develop for clients such as Electronic Arts. The ETC challenged my tech skills
as well as my ability to effectively communicate with others in order to get the most out of an iteration.

Employment

Interaction Prototyper @ Magic Leap

What is interaction in mixed reality?

Lead Programmer @ SeaShells Education Software

from August 2014 to present day

Creating a reading game using speech recognition

One of my first tasks at SeaShells was to create a multiplatform Unity3D plugin for the speech recognition library PocketSphinx. No other equivalent plugin is currently available on the market. My day to day tasks involve meeting with designers and artists in order to add or improve features in the game, bug fixing, and managing interns. I also try to create tools that enable our content creators to more easily add, preview, and modify assets in the game with minimal programmer involvment.

Senior Developer @ iPipeline

from August 2015 to April 2015

Software as a service development in AFFIRM for Annuities

A venture into non-entertainment based programming. AFFIRM for Annuities was a challenging and monolothic codebase that I worked on in C# under the agile methodology. Working closely with clients to deliver customized solutions to major banks.
I was also put in charge of maintaining, updating, and building their mobile solution.

Programming Intern @ Scientech of Berwick

from January 2010 to May 2010

Data managment for the nuclear industry

Worked on a very old codebase and database in order to fix bugs and add features to the Oracle Forms and ASP.net based system. I spoke with clients regularly in order to discuss and address their needs more efficiently when adding or modifying existing features. Scientech had very strict development and QA procedures to follow.